Lian Loke is an artist, designer, educator and researcher, with the body as the central focus of her interdisciplinary practice. She is interested in exploring how new technologies are impacting on the lived body and its possibilities for expression, transformation and transcendence. Her work explores the creation of body-centred artistic works and human-centred design approaches to interactive technologies and spaces. She combines dance, design, human-computer interaction and the aesthetics of interaction to critique and produce concepts, systems and performances. Her enduring interest in dance and kinaesthetic imagination drives creative research into the kinetic expression of machines, with current projects exploring how human and robots can collaboratively interact through movement, gesture and touch. She has a background and PhD in design, human-computer interaction and software engineering, with extensive experience as an educator and researcher. She researches and teaches interaction design. She is an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning, The University of Sydney. She was Director of the Master of Interaction Design and Electronic Arts program (2013-2020) and Head of Design (2021).
As a multi-disciplinary performance artist, she works across dance, durational and site-specific performance installation, costume, interactive kinetic media and robotics. Her practice questions the role of the body in contemporary society, and how our notions of self are open to transformation through inter-cultural, inter-species and inter-media relations and rituals. Her performance works are physical explorations of different ideas and images of the body and self, informed by her training in the Japanese Bodyweather dance methodology with de Quincey Co and earlier somatic and shamanic dance practices (including Body-Mind Centering and Qigong) with American choreographer and teacher Annetta Luce. She is adept in performative modes of improvisation, inhabitation, ritual and spectacle. Her working processes are often bottom-up, generating actions, meanings and new movement languages from interactions with props and costume. She is co-founder of the Pork Collective, a group of artists working in immersive performance installation in festival environments. She has performed and made costume for de Quincey Co and The Living Room Theatre.
As a curator, she has produced exhibitions presenting state-of-the-art ideas that critique and materialise creative and speculative applications of emerging technologies. SHErobots: Tool, Toy, Companion (2022) is the first exhibition of its kind in Australia to showcase the pioneering and emerging work of women in robotics, across art, design, architecture and technology. It was followed by a second edition Ecologies of Care (2024) presented at TU Delft Library, The Netherlands.
She is passionate about making our cities, streets and public spaces more creative, playable and liveable. Recent projects include ElectroSK8, adding playful interactive digital media triggered by movement to the Sydenham skatepark, in partnership with the Inner West Council. She was a member of the Arts and Culture Advisory Committee, Inner West Council and a founding member of the new Inner West Creative Network established in 2023.
Email: [email protected] | [email protected]
As a multi-disciplinary performance artist, she works across dance, durational and site-specific performance installation, costume, interactive kinetic media and robotics. Her practice questions the role of the body in contemporary society, and how our notions of self are open to transformation through inter-cultural, inter-species and inter-media relations and rituals. Her performance works are physical explorations of different ideas and images of the body and self, informed by her training in the Japanese Bodyweather dance methodology with de Quincey Co and earlier somatic and shamanic dance practices (including Body-Mind Centering and Qigong) with American choreographer and teacher Annetta Luce. She is adept in performative modes of improvisation, inhabitation, ritual and spectacle. Her working processes are often bottom-up, generating actions, meanings and new movement languages from interactions with props and costume. She is co-founder of the Pork Collective, a group of artists working in immersive performance installation in festival environments. She has performed and made costume for de Quincey Co and The Living Room Theatre.
As a curator, she has produced exhibitions presenting state-of-the-art ideas that critique and materialise creative and speculative applications of emerging technologies. SHErobots: Tool, Toy, Companion (2022) is the first exhibition of its kind in Australia to showcase the pioneering and emerging work of women in robotics, across art, design, architecture and technology. It was followed by a second edition Ecologies of Care (2024) presented at TU Delft Library, The Netherlands.
She is passionate about making our cities, streets and public spaces more creative, playable and liveable. Recent projects include ElectroSK8, adding playful interactive digital media triggered by movement to the Sydenham skatepark, in partnership with the Inner West Council. She was a member of the Arts and Culture Advisory Committee, Inner West Council and a founding member of the new Inner West Creative Network established in 2023.
Email: [email protected] | [email protected]
Photo by Alex Wisser
I live and work in Warrane/Sydney and acknowledge the Gadigal people as the original custodians of the land, water and sky. I pay my respects to elders and community who continue to care for Country and all beings.